The movie America Sniper was very graphic, thought provoking, moving and makes one so thankful to be an American. It also reinforces how much we should appreciate & pray for our service men & women and their families....

If you haven't seen "American Sniper" go see it. Its an amazing film and the left, ie, Micheal Moore and other idiots hate that he was an American Hero and they aren't.

For those of you that are going to see the movie "American Sniper", which is in most of our movie theatres now; this is the story in addition to the story in the film

TEXAS GOODBYE

This is why America will remain strong. We take care of our own as well as others who may not deserve taking care of. I just wanted to share with you all that out of a horrible tragedy we were blessed by so many people.

Chris Kyle was Derek's teammate through 10 years of training and battle. They both suffer/suffered from PTSD to some extent and took great care of each other because of it.

2006 in Ramadi was horrible for young men that never had any more aggressive physical contact with another human than on a Texas football field.

They lost many friends. Chris became the armed services number #1 sniper of all time. Not something he was happy about, other than the fact that in so doing, he saved a lot of American lives.

Three years ago, his wife Taya asked him to leave the SEAL teams as he had a huge bounty on his head by Al Qaeda. He did and wrote the book "The American Sniper." 100% of the proceeds from the book went to two of the SEAL families who had lost their sons in Iraq .

That was the kind of guy Chris was. He formed a company in Dallas to train military, police and I think firemen as far as protecting themselves in difficult situations. He also formed a foundation to work with military people suffering from PTSD. Chris was a giver not a taker.

He, along with a friend and neighbor, Chad Littlefield, were murdered trying to help a young man that had served six months in Iraq and claimed to have PTSD.

Now I need to tell you about all of the blessings.

Southwest Airlines flew in any SEAL and their family from any airport they flew into

...free of charge.

The employees donated buddy passes and one lady worked for four days without much of a break to see that it happened.

Volunteers were at both airports in Dallas to drive them to the hotel.

The Marriott Hotel reduced their rates to $45 a night and cleared the hotel for only SEAL's and family.

The Midlothian, TX Police Department paid the $45 a night for each room. I would guess there were about 200 people staying at the hotel, 100 of them were SEAL's. Two large buses were chartered (an unknown donor paid the bill) to transport people to the different events and they also had a few rental cars (donated). The police and secret service were on duty 24 hours during the stay at our hotel.

At the Kyle house, the Texas DPS parked a large motor home in front to block the view from reporters. It remained there the entire five days for the SEAL's to congregate in and all to use the restroom so as not to have to go in the house. Taya, their two small children and both sets of parents were staying in the home.

Only a hand full of SEAL's went into the home as they had different duties and meetings were held sometimes on a hourly basis. It was a huge coordination of many different events and security. Derek was assigned to be a Pall Bearer, to escort Chris' body when it was transferred from the Midlothian Funeral Home to the Arlington Funeral Home, and to be with Taya. A tough job.

Taya seldom came out of her bedroom. The house was full with people from the church and other family members that would come each day to help. I spent one morning in a bedroom with Chris’ mom and the next morning with Chad Littlefield's parents (the other man murdered with Chris). A tough job.

George W Bush and his wife Laura met and talked to everyone on the Seal Team one on one. They went behind closed doors with Taya for quite a while. They had prayer with us all. You can tell when people were sincere and caring

Nolan Ryan sent his cooking team, a huge grill and lots of steaks, chicken and hamburgers. They set up in the front yard and fed people all day long including the 200 SEAL's and their families. The next day a local BBQ restaurant set up a buffet in front of the house and fed all once again. Food was plentiful and all were taken care of. The family's church kept those inside the house well fed.

Jerry Jones, the man everyone loves to hate, was a rock star. He made sure that we all were taken care of. His wife and he were just making sure everyone was taken care of….Class... He donated the use of Cowboy Stadium for the services as it was determined that so many wanted to attend.

The charter buses transported us to the stadium on Monday at 10:30 am. Every car, bus, motorcycle was searched with bomb dogs and police. I am not sure if kooks were making threats trying to make a name for themselves or if so many SEAL's in one place was a security risk, I don't know. We willingly obliged. No purses went into the stadium!

We were taken to The Legends room high up and a large buffet was available. That was for about 300 people. We were growing.

A Medal of Honor recipient was there, lots of secret service and police and Sarah Palin and her husband. She looked nice, this was a very formal military service.

The service started at 1:00 pm and when we were escorted onto the field I was shocked. We heard that about 10,000 people had come to attend also. They were seated in the stadium seats behind us. It was a beautiful and emotional service.

The Bagpipe and drum corps were wonderful and the Texas A&M men's choir stood through the entire service and sang right at the end. We were all in tears.

The next day was the 200-mile procession from Midlothian, TX to Austin for burial. It was a cold, drizzly, windy day, but the people were out. We had dozens of police motorcycles riders, freedom riders, five chartered buses and lots of cars. You had to have a pass to be in the procession and still it was huge. Two helicopters circled the procession with snipers sitting out the side door for protection. It was the longest funeral procession ever in the state of Texas. People were everywhere. The entire route was shut down ahead of us, the people were lined up on the side of the road the entire way. Firemen were down on one knee, police officers were holding their hats over their hearts, children waving flags, veterans saluting as we went by. Every bridge had fire trucks with large flags displayed from their tall ladders, people all along the entire 200 miles were standing in the cold weather. It was so heartwarming. Taya rode in the hearse with Chris' body so Derek rode the route with us. I was so grateful to have that time with him.

The service was at Texas National Cemetery. Very few are buried there and you have to apply to get in. It is like people from the Civil War, Medal of Honor winners, a few from the Alamo and all the historical people of Texas. It was a nice service and the Freedom Riders surrounded the outside of the entire cemetery to keep the crazy church people from Kansas that protest at military funerals away from us.

Each SEAL put his Trident (metal SEAL badge) on the top of Chris' casket, one at a time. A lot hit it in with one blow. Derek was the only one to take four taps to put his in and it was almost like he was caressing it as he did it. Another tearful moment.

After the service Governor Rick Perry and his wife, Anita, invited us to the governor's mansion. She stood at the door, greeted each of us individually, and gave each of the SEAL's a coin of Texas. She was a sincere, compassionate, and gracious hostess.

We were able to tour the ground floor and then went into the garden for beverages and BBQ. So many of the Seal team guys said that after they get out they are moving to Texas. They remarked that they had never felt so much love and hospitality. The charter buses then took the guys to the airport to catch their returning flights. Derek just now called and after a 20 hours flight he is back in his spot, in a dangerous land on the other side of the world, protecting America.

We just wanted to share with you, the events of a quite emotional, but blessed week.

Punch-line:

To this day, no one in the White House has ever acknowledged Chris Kyle.

However, the President can call some sport person and congratulate him on announcing to the world that he is gay? What the hell is happening to our society, our honor and our pride??

26
comments:

Interesting how facts and interpretation change with the telling of a story.

2006 in Ramadi was horrible for young men that never had any more aggressive physical contact with another human than on a Texas football field.

War is always terrible. That's why we shouldn't engage in it unless absolutely necessary.

Chris became the armed services number #1 sniper of all time. Not something he was happy about,

Strange, he wrote a whole book bragging about it, to the point where he was shown to make up numerous incidents of his own herorism. He seemed pretty happy with killing people.

Three years ago, his wife Taya asked him to leave the SEAL teams as he had a huge bounty on his head by Al Qaeda

And because the numerous deployments he was volunteering for were destroying his marriage and relationship with his kids, and she threatened to leave him if he stayed in the military.

were murdered trying to help a young man that had served six months in Iraq and claimed to have PTSD.

What is this crap about "claimed to have PTSD"? The guy pretty clearly had it, which is why he snapped and killed two guys. Don't marginalize PTSD even more by claiming that those who act out under its effects don't really have it.

What I can't figure out is why Kyle thought the best way to help this guy was to take him to a shooting range.

The whole funeral thing is kinda strange. This writer seems pretty interested in the fact that they got a bunch of free meals.

However, the President can call some sport person and congratulate him on announcing to the world that he is gay?

Would you like the President to call Chris Kyle? How exactly is he supposed to do that?

War has made a lot of super rich people even richer off our hard earned tax dollar$. I have no time for the likes of Chris Kyle. He signed up for the job, apparently was very good at murdering people, including kids. Came back bragging about it and made money from bragging about his murders.

Now one sees all the wanking and hype over sell-out Clint Eastwood's war porn "movie" (talk about WAR on Xmas), with accompanying ceaseless whining about the usual perfidy of Obama not doing anything correctly.

Like: whatever.

Kyle stupidly thought it made sense to take some Vet with PTSD to a shooting range, and in some sort of karmic justice got murdered himself.

I refuse to watch War porn propaganda about murderers like Kyle. I don't see Kyle as some great Murkin "hero," that I should bow and scrape and venerate. Ptoui.

Rightwingers wank and circle jerk to the legends that are built up around the Kyles of the military industrial complex (clearly done to keep rightwingers handing out money to rich war profiteers), but then they consistently vote in the GOP, who defunds the military grunts, defund the VA, don't assist returning vets adequately, reduce active military pay, etc etc. Support the troops my ass.

Cry me a river over a fairy tale about a murderer. Let's get real. All rightwingers want to do is masturbate to some fairy tales. When it comes to putting out their money to really pay for the proles and rubes doing the dirty work, they start whining about "takers" who don't deserve "entitlements."

"I'm still trying to figure out why, since 9/11, everything to do with the military inspires people on the Right to masturbate."

I'm with you. I notice that dynamic too Charlie, and I don't get it either, but it also leads me to another question:

How, with all the bleating from the right about deficits, they ( and their single-issue RW sock-puppets ) studiously ignore the megaton elephant in the room: Spending trillions of dollars in throwing away good money after bad in ridiculous un-winnable wars.

"Spending trillions of dollars in throwing away good money after bad in ridiculous un-winnable wars."

I don't think either the Pentagon, the larger MIC, OR politicians give a stuff if the USA "wins" any Wars or not. Clearly, that's not the goal anymore, nor has it been in quite some time.

The point is to be perpetually AT War, and as has been pointed out, that makes war profiteers very rich.

The propaganda surrounding any one (or one group) soldier or marine and their alleged "heroism" is just the advertising to make keyboard warriors feel like continuing to pay... and pay... and pay... and pay... all in delusional fantasies about "patriotism" or making us "safe from terrorists." In regard to the latter lie, all that these Wars have done is make us less safe for supposed terrorists.

I thought I remembered there being a lot of bullshit to the story. Chris Kyle was trained to do a job and did it very well. Whether you agree or disagree with the auspices under which he did so is another matter. Now he died tragically though based on the evident not totally unexpected at the hand of a PTSD sufferer. Just a fact, no political spin. I don't get the hero worship, the whole Cowboys Stadium thing etc etc. But the one thing that jumped out at me was the premise that "100% of the proceeds from the book went to two of the SEAL families who had lost their sons in Iraq" set my bullshit alarm off. So from a Conservative writer on a Conservative rag so as not to be called out for bias:

And now for the kicker: It isn’t true. Out of the staggering $3 million that American Sniper collected in royalties for Kyle, only $52,000 actually went to the families of fallen servicemen. (Rather than 100 percent of the proceeds, as the public was led to believe, try 2 percent!) While Kyle’s widow claimed, in her testimony, that they never intended to profit from the book, and “wanted” to donate the money to other veterans, she said they were weren’t able to because of — get this! — “gift-tax laws that prevented them from donating more than $13,000 each to two families last year.”

It goes on about it but link is below. Not a Ventura fan either but here's the link:

Using the Gift Tax law as an excuse for not donating more money, as indicated/promised, to Vet families is bogus. What is means is that the Kyle's would have to pay some tax on their donation, but there's probably also some other loophole to avoid some or all of the taxes.

There's also the issue that allegedly the special forces groups, like the SEALS, aren't supposed to come back and brag about or publicize their exploits, albeit the SEALs lately seem quite able to ignore that. Knowing this, however, makes it even more dubious to heap all the hero worship onto Kyle. Why? Kyle did his job. One can question whether he should have done it or not, but it was his job.

Seems like the hype is intended as others suggest to generate more willingness to keep endlessly emptying our pockets to support a huge war industry that does nothing for US citizens here at home.

I'm pretty tired of it. How 'bout we spend some tax dollars on infrastructure and safety and security measures in our own country for a change?

Agree that this post is about the MIC and discussions about ARRA are pretty much a distraction and inappropriate, but here is some info about the 2009 Stimulus that Obama pushed through, that included the notion of "shovel ready infrastructure projects." It was a mixed bag with some successes, some meh results and some failures.

Obama later admitted that he had erred in how this program was set up.

I have witnessed several highway improvements in the two places that I live in CA, which would not have been possible without these funds. It is felt that this helped keep a certain portion of citizens working, who might have otherwise been laid off (and then most likely had to get different types of - gasp! shriek! - welfare benefits). Rightwingers can't have it both ways. Citizens need employment to stay off welfare, but heaven forbid that the govt assist in jobs creation.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was far from perfect, but frankly, I'd prefer to see a lot more of the same types of programs - even if imperfectly executed - than having MY tax dollar$ wasted on enriching the already obscenely wealthy in their drug & gun-running operations in MENA, and in murdering people across the globe (aka War without End).

Most here know I'm not fan of Obama or the Democratic party, but let's get real. Whining and vetching about ARRA in a blog post about the excesses of War and the weird veneration of a SEAL who enriches himself by bragging about & majorly publicizing his Kill rate?

What the fuck does where he live have to do with anything? That's just more deflection and segue for another of your useless, snide and generalizing comments.

FFS I live in TX probably one of the REDdest states but I don't agree with the RW schtick...or the LW schtick either for that matter. They both suck and are beholding to the oligarchy and therein lies the problem.

Welcome to the Right-Wing Forward Museum

MyRightWingDad.net is a museum dedicated to following the course of American history through a unique lens -- the emails "Red-America" forwards worldwide. Take a look around the archive using the keywords below, and leave a comment or two.

This museum displays unedited, often offensive and untrue material with no endorsement intended by curators or contributors.